The Catastrophe of Escalation in the War with Iran

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greetings and welcome to the United States Transhumanist Party Virtual
Enlightenment Salon. My name is Jannati stolier Off the second
and I am the Chairman of the US Transhumanist Party.
Here we hold conversations with some of the world's leading
thinkers in longevity, science, technology, philosophy, and politics. Like the

(00:21):
philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, we aim to connect
every field of human endeavor and arrive at new insights
to achieve longer lives, greater rationality, and the progress of
our civilization. Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our
US Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon of Sunday, June twenty second,

(00:46):
twenty twenty five. Well, unexpected events happen, and sometimes they
happen simultaneously. So unfortunately, our previously scheduled guests, Matthew O'Connor,
had a last minute time conflict, and I only found
out about this time conflict twenty five minutes prior to

(01:09):
the start of the salon, so he will not be
able to join us today. We will see about rescheduling him. However,
there have been momentous world events transpiring and I would
like to discuss them today.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Let's see.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yes, So I would like to discuss the catastrophe of
the United States entering the war with Iran, and in
order to do this, I prepared some remarks that I
would like to read to our audience. They are going

(02:00):
to become part of an essay that will be published
shortly to express my deepest concern and indeed my outrage
at the actions that the US federal government has taken
yesterday in particular. But let us go back a little

(02:24):
more than a week. On June thirteenth, twenty twenty five,
Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a so called preemptive strike
against Iran's nuclear facilities, military installations, and high ranking officials.
There are many casualties of this attack, and they include

(02:48):
figures like the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Hussein Salami,
and nuclear scientists very Dounabasi and Mohammed Mehdi Tehranchi. This
reckless act, justified by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a

(03:08):
response to a so called imminent nuclear threat, was catastrophic enough,
but on June twenty first, twenty twenty five, the United States,
under President Donald Trump's direction, escalated this crisis into a
full scale war by committing American air and naval forces

(03:31):
to strike Iranian targets, including missile sites and command centers.
Trump's decision, announced with characteristic bombast and with the rationale
that this was the only way to stop Iran's aggression,
has drawn the United States into a conflict that risks

(03:53):
American lives, assets, and the very survival of human civilization.
Of some of the worst case scenarios come to pass.
As a transhumanist who is committed to reason, individual liberty,
and the preservation of human potential, I condemn both Israel's

(04:16):
initial strike and Trump's reckless escalation as affronts to the
principles of a free, flourishing, and forward looking society. This
war threatens not only regional stability, but the future of
humanity itself. President Trump's decision to plunge the United States

(04:39):
into a war with Iran is a grave error, driven
by a dangerous blend of bravado and shortsighted geopolitical gains.
By deploying US forces to conduct air strikes on Iranian targets,
Trump has not only entangled America in a conflict that

(04:59):
could have been of avoided, but has also exposed American troops, ships,
and bases, such as those on the Persian Gulf to
retaliatory attacks. And again, we can hope that those attacks
will not happen, but Iran's regime has threatened those attacks.
Trump's claim that these strikes will neutralize Iran's threat ignores

(05:24):
the reality that military escalation fuels a cycle of retaliation,
as evidenced by Iran's vow to target US allies and
interests across the Middle East. So this is a potential
set of attacks that could have been avoided had the

(05:45):
United States chosen a course of de escalation instead, that
that is not what we are getting. Trump's reckless commitment
of American resources and personnel serves no rational purpose. It
diverts attention away from domestic priorities, including technological innovation and

(06:08):
economic prosperity, as well as challenges that we have in
this country lack of housing availability and affordability, the increased
rates of homelessness, the increasing rates of crime in this country,
inflation which unfortunately persists. And overcoming these problems, especially through

(06:31):
the judicious application of science and technology, is a central
approach toward a transhumanist vision of human flourishing and what
are we getting Instead? We are getting meaningless death and destruction.
And I have condemned Israel's decision to strike initially. I

(06:58):
have written when strike occurred that this was due to
Benjamin Netan Yahoo's desire to prolong his stay in power.
Benjamin Netan Yahoo is known to be a corrupt politician.
He has been on trial for corruption in Israel for

(07:20):
many years now, and indeed, initial allegations of corruption against
him began in the nineteen nineties during his first tenure
as Prime minister. So, of course, in a country that
is at war, people tend to rally around the leader,
and the popular opinion tends to be that it is

(07:42):
unwise to shift leaders during a time of war or
crisis or national emergency, and seasoned politicians like Netan Yahu
know this very well. Hence, Robert Higgs, a great American scholar,
has written a book called Crisis and Leviathan, which documents

(08:06):
how the scope and power of centralized governments and the
ability of centralized governments to impose restrictions on the people
ratchets up during each crisis and then after the crisis abates,
usually a much longer time than was originally expected. The restrictions,

(08:29):
limitations amount of central authority get dialed back a little bit,
but not to the level at which they existed before
the crisis. So essentially Netanyahu is playing a game of
how long he can stay in power, because he was
about to be deposed essentially a second time, because he

(08:54):
already lost his position as Prime minister earlier in twenty
nineteen because of the corruption scandals surrounding him, and then
he got back into office in twenty twenty two, so
he was about to be deposed again, and then October seventh,
twenty twenty three happened. And when those events happened, of

(09:18):
course they were horrific and there's no excuse, no justification
for what Hamas did on October seventh, twenty twenty three.
This was a group of terrorists and murderers who infiltrated
Israel and killed over one thousand innocent Israelis, most of
them civilians, and kidnapped over two hundred others who became hostages.

(09:44):
And my initial reaction when this happened was, of course,
Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas, and
of course these hostages, who are completely innocent need to
be freed, and there were various American hostages as well,
and hostage from European countries to hostages from East Asian countries,
so not just limited to Israeli Jews. But this was

(10:09):
an international crisis, so for a few weeks it was
entirely reasonable for Israel to strike back against Hamas, including
the use of military force to try to take out
the leadership of Hamas. But what actually happened. Did Israel

(10:29):
execute surgical strikes against Hamasa's leadership. Initially that was the hope,
but that's not how it turned out. Did Israel attempt
missions specifically for the rescue of the hostages, or negotiations
to rescue the hostages. Yes, negotiations were undertaken in my view,

(10:50):
though they were undertaken halfheartedly and they were not a
priority for the Israeli government. The priority for the Israeli
government seems to have been one punishment of the people
of Gaza, who were I think unfairly lumped together with Hamas. Yes,
there are some Hamas sympathizers there, but I think the

(11:11):
vast majority of the civilian population of any area just
wants to lead peaceful lives, and they do not have
control over their government. It's a myth that, oh, the
people get the government they deserve, and if they don't
like their government, they should overthrow it. By what means
are ordinary, largely defenseless civilians who do not have any

(11:33):
fighting skills, By what means are they supposed to overthrow
their governments? So I think the Palestinian people in Gaza
were held hostage by Hamas and their living situation was
certainly made worse by the Israeli bombing campaigns, and some
hostages have been freed, largely due to the assistance of

(11:53):
the United States and European powers in negotiations, because whatever
the flaws of American foreign policy, I think US administrations
have tended to be more restrained in the Middle East
than the Israeli governments, particularly under net and Yahu. So
there have been some successes, but tens of hostages at

(12:14):
least have lost their lives. Dead hostages continue to be discovered,
and there were situations when the Israeli defense forces killed
hostages who had freed themselves and had tried to escape
and announce themselves to the IDF troops that were in Gaza.
So this was a clear situation where the Israeli military

(12:38):
had become, let's say, enraged and acting far outside the
legitimate scope of proportional retaliation in war. Rather, it had
adopted a mentality of shoot first and asked questions later.
And we have to ask the Israeli military is so
much more powerful than Hamas, than any terrorist forces that

(13:02):
it has been fighting against. The Israeli military has been
very successful over time in achieving objectives and gaza, such
as killing all of the senior Hamas leadership. There are
essentially no senior Hamas leaders left.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
All of the.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
People who masterminded the October seventh attacks, all of the
people who were involved in them, are now dead for
all practical purposes. So the ability for these attacks to recur,
at least from that source from Hamas is close to nil.
So why is this campaign continuing? Well again, Netta Yah,

(13:41):
who is a corrupt politician. He wants to stay in power.
Very seldom does a leader of a wartime country get
deposed in a time of war. Furthermore, Netanyahu isn't even
the worst of the Israeli politicians. He has in his
co members of his cabinet, including two named Smotrich and

(14:05):
Ben vere who are very aggressively expansionistic, and they believe
based on theological reasons, so not rational secular reasons, but
theological reasons, that it is the duty of Jews to
expel non Jews from the territory they consider to be
greater Israel. Now, as a party that prizes secular values,

(14:28):
of course, the US Transhumanist Party does not accept any
religious arguments from any faith, any theology for why people
shouldn't be allowed to live where they live, and I
stress it's irrelevant whether it's Judaism, Christianity, Islam, whatever the
case may be. We do not accept religious justifications for

(14:49):
limiting the freedom of individuals to live where they choose,
and more moderate Israeli governments have tended to adhere to
that have a population of over a million Arabs living
there and they tend to be treated better than the
Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. But that was

(15:14):
because there are factions or movements within Israel that do
try to essentially act on the basis of more secular values,
but those are not the people in power right now.
The people in power are from the coalition that Netanyahu
has assembled, and that coalition is driven by the interests

(15:38):
of these aggressive expansionists like Smotrich, because without them, Netanyahu's
government will fail. And that's another reason why Netanyaku is
not interested in peace. He's not interested in de escalation
because if he were to acquiect to a Resi and

(16:01):
well polition partners with Lament would collapse. So this is
why the war in Gaza was dragging on for so long.
But of course that war had met with a great
deal of international condemnation. There have been protests throughout the world,
and even people who originally supported Israel's right to defend

(16:23):
itself recognized over time that this had gone too far,
that this war was lasting far too long in terms
of what it would actually take for a reasonable proportional
retaliation against the aggression of a ragtag terrorist group like Hamas.
Israel had already expanded the war into Lebanon to destroy

(16:45):
not just the leadership of Hezbolah and Hesbelah has been
fighting on the side of Hamas against Israel, but also
cities in Lebanon have been bombed, many innocent civilians have
been killed, So that is already an illegitimate extension of
the scope of the war. But I think there came

(17:08):
to be a recognition that if the war were limited
to Gaza, or even to Lebanon, it would still run
its course pretty soon because the patients within Israel for
the delays and getting the hostages freed, had already been
running things. So net and Yah who needed another way

(17:29):
to continue the wartime state of emergency so he could
remain in power, and what better way to do it
than to invoke the old boogeyman of Iran. Now, keep
in mind, Iran has been on the verge of acquiring
a nuclear weapon allegedly for at least thirty years, and

(17:53):
for at least thirty years, politicians, including Netanyahu himself, have
invoked rhetorics such as Iran is just a few weeks
away from acquiring nuclear weapons, and we need to strike
at Iran now lest they become a nuclear arm power,
and then we can't attack them so easily. Well. Tulsey Gabbert,

(18:14):
the Director of National Intelligence for the Trump administration, had
issued various reports earlier this year essentially suggesting that the
best assessment of US intelligence services is that Iran is
actually not close to developing a nuclear weapon. Maybe they're trying.

(18:35):
Maybe all of this uranium enrichment, which is ostensibly for
civilian purposes, does have an ulterior motive for the Iranian leadership,
but they are not succeeding. They are not about to
have several nuclear missiles that they could launch at Israel,
and the range of those nuclear missiles would not reach Europe, say,

(18:56):
it would certainly not reach the United States. So under
no circumstances would this be a situation that endangered the
US or even the US's NATO allies. So this is
not our war, this is Nezan Yahoo's war. It's not

(19:17):
even the Israeli people's war, because the Israeli people, in
my view, were not imminently threatened until June thirteenth with
Operation Rising Lion, where of course Iran's regime retaliated and
launched missiles all over Israel, and the Iranian missiles are
not as capable of being finally targeted as say Israeli

(19:41):
missiles or American missiles. So we had a situation where
civilians got killed, apartment buildings and Tel Aviv got bombed,
a hospital got bombed, a research center got bombed. All
of this is very tragic, and I sympathize with the
suffering of the Israeli people right now as well, because

(20:01):
they were dragged into this unnecessary war that they didn't
ask for, and they didn't vote for, and they didn't
have to lose their lives for. But even worse is
Trump's decision to drag the United States into this war. Furthermore,

(20:22):
Trump's actions lack the transparency and the evidence required to
justify such a drastic step. The administration's assertion that Iran
posed an immediate threat to US interests, echoing Israel's vague
claims about Iran's nuclear program, rests on unverified intelligence. Indeed,

(20:42):
Trump's own Director of National Intelligence, Telsea Gabbard, as I mentioned,
had for months reported that Iran's nuclear program poses no
imminent threat. As a rational individualist, I demand the decisions
of such magnitude be grounded in objective, publicly accessible facts.
Trump's failure to provide this, coupled with its history of

(21:05):
prioritizing dubious political optics over reasoned policy, suggests that this
escalation is as much about projecting a contrived image of
strength as it is about any genuine security concern. This
betrayal of reason risks not only American lives, but the
stability of the global order, pushing humanity closer to catastrophe. Transhumanism,

(21:29):
on the other hand, champions the indefinite extension of human life,
the enhancement of cognitive and physical capacities, and a world
where reason and innovation triumph over destruction. War, particularly aggressive
war initiated without clear justification, is antithetical to this vision.

(21:50):
As I wrote when Israel first initiated its attack on Iran,
I do not support Israel's reckless first strike against Iran.
Its only real goal is to prolong the war and
thus net in Yahu's power. Israel's strike squandered human potential
by extinguishing lives that could have contributed to global knowledge.

(22:12):
The US entry into this conflict compounds this tragedy, diverting
vast resources financial, technological, and human from constructive endeavors like
medical research or artificial intelligence toward the barbarism of warfare.
And we include in this the loss of Iranian scientists

(22:32):
like Abbassi and Tehranchi, and now the endangerment of American personnel.
All of this represents a setback to the collaborative pursuit
of a transhumanist future. Israel's strike was not preemptive, but
preventive aimed at a speculative future threat rather than an
imminent attack, As noted by Matthew Iglesias in an article

(22:58):
from July fourth, two thousand five, in the Atlantic called
preemption versus prevention, This distinction matters. Preemption requires clear evidence
of an immediate danger, as was the case, for instance,
in the nineteen sixty seven Six Day War, when Israel
had evidence of various Arab countries imminently being about to

(23:21):
attack it, whereas prevention or the waging of preventive warfare
rests on conjecture. Israel's claim that Iran was days from
assembling multiple nuclear weapons lacks public justification and verification, undermining
its legitimacy. This was just Netan Yahoo say so. The

(23:42):
US escalation following Israel's lead further erodes the moral foundation
of this conflict. The civilian toll in Iran, including casualties
and residential areas, violates the principle of ethical individualism, which
holds individuals innocent and undeserving of punishment for actions committed
by their governments. Again, as I have stated, individuals who

(24:06):
lack military training or combat training, who don't organize revolutions
and their free time don't really have good ways to
retaliate against genuinely oppressive governments, especially if they don't have
democratic means to do so, and certainly in Iran they
do not. And I'm not saying that the Iranian regime

(24:28):
is good, or that it treats its people well, or
that it shouldn't be overthrown. But if it is overthrown,
it should be overthrown by peaceful means, and there have
been peaceful means that have overthrown dictatorial regimes before. You
don't need to bomb the very people whom you expect

(24:49):
to overthrow an oppressive regime. If anything, that further motivates
them to rally around the flat, unite against the ex
journal aggressors, and around that regime, because for all of
the depredations of that regime, it wasn't bombing their homes,
it wasn't killing their families, at least not for the

(25:10):
majority of them, and not imminently. And this has happened before.
Every time any country has been invaded by an aggressive
military force and significant civilian casualties resulted, the existing government
of that country received a huge boost in public support
and was less likely to be overthrown as a result,

(25:33):
and I emphasize as an ethical individualist, each life lost,
whether it the Iranian, Israeli or American, diminishes the reservoir
of human potential. This is a loss that transhumanism seeks
to prevent. And we can't have radical life extension for
people who are dead, for people who are killed in war.

(25:53):
That's just a basic fact. Practically, this war risks spiraling
out of control. Iran's retaliatory strikes that also began on
June thirteenth, twenty twenty five, with hundreds of drones and
ballistic missiles launched against Israel, may now expand to target
US assets. The IDF itself has warned of a prolonged operation,

(26:17):
and now this is bolstered by US involvement. All of
these factors suggested deepening quagmire. The disruption of nuclear negotiations
with the Iran withdrawing from talks previously scheduled from June fifteenth,
twenty twenty five, eliminates a diplomatic path to de escalation.
The economic fallout spiking oil prices and market instability threatens

(26:41):
global prosperity, further diverting resources from humanity's advancement. The US
entry into this war exponentially increases the risk of a
broader conflict involving world powers, potentially erupting into a world
war with existential consequences for humanity. The existence of nuclear
arsenals creates what is a precarious balance during the best

(27:03):
of times, one that could be all too easily disrupted
by miscommunication, human error, or deliberate aggression. Iran's nuclear program,
though damaged, remains a flashpoint. The US strikes may push
Iran to accelerate weaponization as a deterrent. Indeed, what just
happened should be the strongest case for Iran's leadership to

(27:28):
accelerate its pursuit of nuclear weapons or more destructive capabilities,
even if their motivations are purely defensive, because the takeaway
that they will get from all of this is essentially,
our defenses weren't strong enough, we weren't fast enough in

(27:48):
developing a sufficient deterrent, and look what happened. And of course,
the more Iran tries to arm itself, the likelier it
is that this would trigger a nuclear response from Israel
or its allies. And Israel does have nuclear weapons. This
is widely known, even though officially the Israeli government does

(28:11):
not acknowledge this. I think we are all wise enough
to understand that Israel is a nuclear power, whereas Iran
right now is not a nuclear power. So we have
a situation of aggression by a nuclear power against a
non nuclear power. What lesson does this teach the Iranian
regime about what nuclear powers are able to do that

(28:34):
non nuclear powers are not. The involvement of global powers
China and Russia potentially backing Iran and NATO aligning itself
with the US and Israel raises the specter of a
world war, and that is the most disturbing possibility arising
out of this. The Wall Street Journal on June fifteenth,

(28:57):
twenty twenty five noted condemnation of the Israeli strikes and
expression of support for Iran signaling a dangerous alignment. And
certainly that rhetoric from various politically connected commentators in Russia
has escalated since the United States entered the war with Iran,

(29:19):
and it's important to emphasize a nuclear exchange, even if limited,
would be catastrophic millions, possibly billions of life lost, environmental
devastation that cannot be recovered from That makes climate change
from carbon dioxide emissions look like a rounding error, and
the derailment of scientific progress would cripple humanity's path to

(29:43):
a transhumanist future. American assets in the region, including naval
fleets and bases, are now vulnerable to Iran's missile capabilities,
risking thousands of lives and billions and resources. The broader
escalation could disrupt global trade, energy supplies, and technological development,
setting back the conditions, including stability, cooperation, and survival itself,

(30:06):
that are necessary for humanity to overcome its biological limits.
This war, initiated by Israel and escalated by Trump, is
not merely a geopolitical misstep, but a threat to human
civilization's survival. As I've stated already, my critique does not
negate Israel's or America's right to self defense, and as

(30:28):
I have also stated, I agreed that the original acts
of self defense against Hamas were reasonable. However, the elimination
of Hamas's leadership should have led to de escalation, not
expansion into Lebanon or Iran, and Netanyahu's prolongation of conflict,
now intensified by Trump's entry into the war, signals a

(30:50):
motive of political self preservation. For them. Indeed, we see
that Netanyahu and Trump have been beset by crises. I've
mentioned Netanyahu's predicament with his multi year's long trials for corruption. Trump,

(31:11):
in the meantime, has been faced with escalating domestic unrest
sparked by his heavy handed deportations of immigrants, undermining of
due process and democratic institutions, and reckless economic mismanagement in
the form of an arbitrary and capricious tariff policy. Trump's
and Netanyahu's insistence on sustained military operations serves their political interests,

(31:34):
not the cause of human progress. The transhumanist vision rejects
such short sighted power plays. Leaders committed to humanity's future
would prioritize diplomacy and innovation. The resources expended on hundreds
of aircraft, munitions and American troop deployments could have instead
advanced medical research, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, life extension feels

(31:58):
central to transit current human limitations. Instead, this war risks
American lives and global stability, undermining the conditions for progress.
We have just found out this morning that the United
States used fourteen of these bunker buster bombs, which are
the weapons with the strongest payload other than nuclear missiles,

(32:22):
that the US has fourteen bombs to destroy the Fourdoh
nuclear facility, and the Iranian regime states whether or not
this is true, that that facility had been evacuated for months.
So the United States just spent many, many billions of
dollars destroying this very secure facility that maybe didn't even

(32:46):
have the nuclear stockpiles or the research operations going on
there that Trump and NED and Yahoo suspected or wanted
to target. But certainly that strike did greatly antagonize the
regime of Iran. So what is the alternative to this?

(33:08):
The alternative is a return to rational individualism and transhumanist optimism. Diplomacy,
though challenging, is the only path to de escalation. The
US must withdraw from offensive operations and push for renewed
nuclear negotiations mediated by neutral parties like Oman. And it's
been clear from recent months that Trump is not trustworthy

(33:31):
as a party to these negotiations because at the same
time as he was essentially saying how much he would
like a nuclear deal with Iran, he was actually well
aware of Israel's plans to launch the first strike, and
the US assistance to Israel had been planned for several

(33:53):
months in advance. There's no way to execute an operation
this sophisticated without planning it for several months. So this
was coordinated well in advance. All of Trump's talk about
giving two weeks to make a decision for maybe the
Iranian regime to come forward to negotiate, that was a lie.
It was a blatant lie. Trump did not even wait

(34:14):
two weeks. He waited essentially three days from making that announcement.
So this was all done to deceive both the Iranian
regime and the international community as to what the United
States governments and tensions were, what the United States' role
in this conflict was or wasn't. And it seems that

(34:36):
truly neutral third parties need to be involved in order
to keep these negotiations honest, because I'm afraid to say,
as an American citizen, I cannot trust my own government
in this transparency regarding Iran's nuclear program, with verifiable safeguards
could address security concerns without further bloodshed. So again, could

(34:57):
neutral countries come together and and formulate some sorts of
guarantees including inspections, or some sorts of exchanges international exchanges
of energy that would make sure that any nuclear development
from Iran is limited strictly to civilian purposes. I think

(35:19):
that remains to be seen, but anything is better than war.
The international community must hold both Israel and the US
accountable for civilian casualties and must demand adherence to international law.
As a transhumanist, I envision a world where nations compete
through innovation, not warfare, where the threat of annihilation is

(35:43):
replaced by the pursuit of human flourishing. The Israel and
US war on Iran, born of reckless aggression, risks a
global catastrophe that could extinguish humanity's potential. I call for
an immediate cessation of hostilities, a recommitment to dialogue, and
a redirection of energies toward a future where life triumphs
over death. And make no mistake, this war only leads

(36:07):
to death. There are no other outcomes that it could
result in. The path away from death, the path to
transcendence of our human limitations, lies not in the ruins
of Tehran or the loss of American lives, but in
the minds and hearts of a civilization that dares to
dream beyond war. So thank you very much for listening today,

(36:31):
and I am happy to engage with the audience for
the rest of our time and consider questions, comments, criticisms.
But first Art ramon Are Director of Visual Art and
current vice chairman is here, so I would invite him
to share his thoughts on this conflict.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
I remember being young and I first learned about the
Paul the world, and I was kind of a news junkie.
So I was a news junkie, learned a lot about politics.
But it's this has been ongoing my entire life. It's
nothing new. It's to me, I have this lens of

(37:19):
a kind of the world. The people in charge want
to follow this biblical narrative, and to me now I
sort of see that as what they're referred to as
manifestation of reality or creation of reality, because they see
there's this idea that we sort of project our own,

(37:41):
our own reality. So they have to sort of, you know,
guide events in order to fit a biblical narrative. And
I don't believe in the prophecy. I believe in that
it's a script. The script. The scripture is a script,
and they're following that scripts as well as possible in
order to sort of manifest this reality. So that's how

(38:04):
I see things happening in the Middle East. But but yeah,
I mean the war, it's that's kind of what the
Bible says is going to happen, you know, And yeah,
it's it's following that narrative, I would say that probably

(38:27):
it's gonna get worse. That's the way I see things happening.
The very end of revelations, things turn out really great,
when some Messiah comes down from the sky and things
will be well for a while. But I don't think
we're at that point. I think we're at the point
where things are to get really bad. So it's something

(38:51):
I sort of expected my entire life. But the timeline,
you know, now, I mean my fifties. I remember being
in my twenties in the Persian Gulf on moore to
a Navy ship and thinking things would be closer to
that time, but it didn't happen. Now I'm in my fifties.
Hopefully won't get drafted, Hopefully my son won't get drafted

(39:14):
to fight some armageddon out in the Middle East. But
but yeah, it's that's how I view that's my worldview
of the events out in the Middle East. It's never ending.
It's just going to continue until one side completely defeats
the other. And like I said, whoever wants to pull

(39:39):
the strings to create the events to sort of fit
a biblical narrative, they're still in charge doing that. So
and one are my fears that I don't really read
it you, but that has sort of developed in my
mind is that, you know, Pleat feel like a like Iran.

(40:00):
Even though they don't have nooks, they can still attack
us fairly hard. And there are natural dangers. You know,
here in the US we have the Yellowstone Caldera, you know,
that can be agitated to set off that volcano. It's
a super volcano that would affect the world globally. Though,

(40:22):
we have another natural danger, and that's off of the
Canary Islands. There's a volcano there and they call that
the Cumbre Vieta. It's an active volcano ridge on the
island of La Palma. It wouldn't take much to set

(40:42):
that off.

Speaker 1 (40:44):
You know.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Iran has submarines. I'm sure they have submarine submarine drones
and they can do that without Newts. All they have
to do is set off that landslide, and that last
slide would wipe out the entire east coast of the
US and this could be done, and it's been another

(41:07):
danger for a long time. And if I were a
road in and.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
Would be on my list of possible uh, you know,
utatory attacks against the US, you know, entirely money here
and easily easily done with just a conventional that they
already have.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Yes, Gramone, it seems like your audio has gotten distorted
a bit for whatever reason, and this is very recent, so,
but I do get the main point that you've articulated,
which is that there are many ways for Iran to

(41:50):
attack the United States, and it doesn't have to be
through launching a nuclear weapon. Indeed, it's a mistake always
back one's adversary into a corner and leave them no
peaceful ways out of a conflict, because, especially if the
adversary is relatively weaker and less capable, it will tend

(42:15):
to resort to asymmetric warfare. And one form of asymmetric
warfare is terrorism. So why have say al Qaeda or
Isis attacked the United States in the ways that they
have through causing mass civilian casualties, attacking essentially targets of opportunity.

(42:39):
It's because that is all they could do, they stand
no chance against the US military. And now that the
Iranian regimes military capabilities have been degraded, that its nuclear
program has been set back, though maybe not nearly as
much as Trump and Netan Yahoo announced, they are going

(43:02):
to try to find other ways to attack America and Americans.
And this is the tragedy of it, with these asymmetrical tactics,
which I think are highly reprehensible by the way civilians
bear the brunt of the damage, and the Iranian regime

(43:23):
may say, well, we have no choice but to do that.
I obviously don't agree with it, but I see that
as a very real threat.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Now.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
You also mentioned how essentially all throughout your adult life,
these conflicts have been raging and there doesn't seem to
be an end to them. And I remember I was
fourteen when the September eleventh attacks happened, and I was

(43:54):
not quite sixteen when the United States invaded Iraq during
the Second Persian Gulf War, and at the time, I
was still hopeful that the actions taken by the US
military in Afghanistan and Iraq would objectively defuse the threat

(44:15):
of terrorism. I was hoping that these would be relatively
quick operations, and if there were some military occupation, it
would be akin to the US military presence in Germany
or Japan after World War Two, where American troops after
the war had ended, didn't fight, they helped with the
civilian administration, they helped with rebuilding the countries, and clearly

(44:38):
after World War II what the United States did in
Germany and Japan succeeded. But this was not the case
with Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly, and for much of my
adult life, the United States occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. It
scaled back its presence in Iraq substantially, but there are

(45:01):
still US troops in Iraq, and of course Isis emerged
as a threat in the early twenty tens, so the
United States had to go back into Iraq and Syria
and intensify its presence there. And in Afghanistan. As soon
as the United States withdrew its military, the government there
just collapsed and the Taliban came back into power, and

(45:23):
it was as if nothing happened other than tremendous loss
of life and destruction of infrastructure in the intervening twenty years.
But it seems other than that the US military intervention
had no positive effect there, and the American people, I
think by and large recognized this. There was a huge
shift within the Republican Party itself regarding whether these foreign

(45:49):
entanglements were seen as acceptable. The majority of the Republican
base had moved away from being broadly sympathetic to the
neo conservative form and policy of the George W. Bush
administration and being more aligned with people like Ron Paul Ran,
Paul Thomas Massey, Justin Amash who campaigned against further US

(46:13):
military entanglements, and even Trump himself figured out that this
was now a popular position. Of course, Trump I don't
think is personally committed to that position. I think he
is more of a militaristic president. He likes to carry
a big stick and shake it around. He may say

(46:34):
he wants a deal, but behind the scenes he may
just want to bully people. Still, Trump campaigned on the
promise of getting the United States out of existing wars,
including proxy wars. One could say the US is involved
in a proxy war in Ukraine by supplying weapons and

(46:57):
training and assistance in terms of strategy to the Ukrainian
government of Zelenski. But Trump hasn't even been able to
succeed at that and Trump definitely campaigned on not starting
any new wars. So what has happened with that promise?
We are now only five months into the Trump administration

(47:22):
and we don't see that happening. We see the opposite.
So it seems that Trump wasn't really serious about this.
He was just using it to score political points for
his campaign. And I feel genuinely sorry for the people
who believed him, who shifted to voting Republican just because

(47:43):
they didn't like the foreign policy of the Biden administration.
And certainly I had many issues with the foreign policy
of the Biden administration, but they got themselves a worse
foreign policy because Biden, for all of his problems, was
restrained to a certain extent. He did not want any
situations to escalate to a conflict among great powers. He

(48:07):
was actually a restraining influence on Zelensky and the Ukrainian
intelligence and what they wanted to do. He set conditions,
and he set red lines, or his advisors did at
the very least, though he was personally involved in the
decision making. This was one area that he actually tried
to stay personally involved in. So again, no great words

(48:30):
of praise for Biden on his foreign policy. But Biden
had the experience of the Cold War. I think in
the course of his tenure as a politician, he had
an understanding of how devastating a nuclear conflict would be.
In that entire generation of politicians essentially lived through that
and had that understanding. And now the current crop of

(48:55):
decision makers in America and in Israel our hawks, because
they failed to realize what could go wrong and how
their visions of a quick, victorious war could end up
in quagmire and tragedy. So now let's go to some
audience comments here, because I think there are many good ones.

(49:20):
Elaine Walker writes no war, and of course I agree,
as I've said, this is not my war. This shouldn't
be any of our war. If we are civilians in
the United States, we had no decision making authority over this.
We didn't vote for the war, we didn't vote for
representatives who voted for the war. According to the US Constitution,

(49:44):
Congress is the entity that needs to declare war. So
the executive the president cannot take unilateral action to bring
the United States into war, and even with undeclared wars
in the past, say the authorization of military force after
September eleventh, which then led to the occupations of Afghanistan

(50:09):
and Iraq. There was a vote of Congress to enable this.
Now there's not even that pretense, So I do not
consider this to be a legitimate war or a constitutional war.
Mana Makani writes, the USA attacked my country. He also writes,

(50:29):
I'm so angry because of this war, and Mana is
in Tehran right now, so that's very regrettable, and I
would say I am sorry to all of the civilians
right now in Iran who are having to flee Tehran,
who are having their residences bombed, who are having their

(50:51):
lives disrupted, because again, innocent, peaceful Iranians do not deserve this.
I'm not going to say anything about the miliity, terry leadership,
or the Ayatolas. I don't particularly like any of them,
but the peaceful people of Iran have been under the
thumb of this regime too, and being bombed out of

(51:15):
their homes isn't going to help them overcome the injustices
that they experienced before. Mike Lazine writes, well, I saw
this coming with Iran. Trump is so predictable with certain
things with causing trouble in the Middle East. And he
also writes Bibie Benjamin Netanyakho is predictable as well. He

(51:37):
is like the Israeli maga, so make Israel great again,
Maga mega. Well, I agree. It seems that Netanyahu has
the same opportunistic playbook that Trump does, in the sense
that Trump keeps jumping from one crisis to another. Trump
actually enjoys there being a certain degree of crises as

(52:02):
long as the next crisis can cover up the previous one.
And the reason why Trump has been so difficult to
foil and defeat is that he doesn't just have one
thing that's egregiously wrong with what he's doing. He has
many things, and new things keep coming up. So when

(52:23):
Trump's critics, Trump's opponents are focused on this incident un
or that incident under this corruption charte or that trial
or that conviction, in two weeks it'll become old news
and the public is going to focus on something else.
And as long as Trump can come out seeming like
a strong, decisive leader in the face of the next crisis,

(52:45):
which he is inevitably going to bungle, then he survives
in power. So it's hopping from one crisis to the next,
and both Trump and NED and Yahu are fairly advanced
in age. Trump is approaching eighty, just turned seventy nine,
NET and Yahoo's in his mid seventies. So I think

(53:06):
they expect to do this until they die, That's my hypothesis.
At least they expect to keep jumping from one crisis
to another so that the people forget the next crisis. Now,
with Trump, we have a constitution that limits the term
of office to eight years for a president, and I
don't think he's going to be able to pull off

(53:28):
a perpetual presidency. But he may install a successor JD.
Vance or Donald Trump Junior, who will give him immunity
and pardon him preemptively for everything, and then he can
go play golf or have his talk shows and talk
about how he made America great again. Net and Yahoo, however,

(53:48):
can stay in power indefinitely. Keep in mind he was
first prime minister in the nineteen nineties, and there were gaps.
Of course, there were others who served in that position,
but nothing limits the term of an Israeli prime minister
in office. Essentially, as long as he can hold his
governing coalition together, he is in office, and that is

(54:12):
what he intends to do, because again, his fate will
not be good if he leaves office, because all of
these corruption trials will come back to haunt him. And
now he has the apparatus of the Israeli state to
protect him. He has a lot of resources to fight
back against these allegations. And again, nobody is going to
remove a wartime leader while he is perceived to be winning. Now,

(54:36):
Luisa Royo writes, Israel is a threat to itself at
this point, I agree. Now again, I am sympathetic to
the country of Israel. I am sympathetic to the people
of Israel. I am the furthest thing from an anti Semite.
By the way, both Jews and Arabs are Semitic peoples,

(54:58):
so I could say I am pro Semitic in that
I wish the best for Jewish people in Israel, for
Arabs in Israel, for Arabs outside of Israel. And I
want peace, I want prosperity, I want technological growth, I

(55:19):
want economic interactions, I want cultural interactions among these people.
Whether they're religious or secular, it doesn't matter to me.
They're human beings. They deserve to live good lives. So
I think Israel is a good country by and large.
It is a country that has been at the forefront

(55:41):
of technological innovation. It is a country that has been
very hard won from the elements in the sense that
much of Israel, originally much of Palestine, was a desert,
and yet it was turned into a thriving first world
an asterisk country. The asterisk is it's not really a

(56:03):
first world country if it keeps getting involved in these
destructive wars and the people live under the threat of bombing,
raids and terrorism. This is not a high quality standard
of living. But if they didn't have that, they would
be a bonafide first world country. And I want that

(56:24):
future for Israel. But in order for them to reach
that future, they have to stop disproportionately responding to aggression,
and they have to stop initiating aggression. And I know
there are large segments of the Israeli population who agree
with me, who have protested against Netanyahu, who have expressed

(56:46):
outrage at how the Israeli government has handled this hostage crisis,
and they were really slow playing the hostage crisis. Netanyahu
was in no hurry to get the majority of the
hostages freed. It was the US government, especially under Biden
a little bit under Trump, that was pressuring Netanyahu to
keep agreeing to deals to release some of the hostages.

(57:08):
But why have all of these hostages not been released?
Why have many of them now been in captivity for
a year and a half. And keep in mind, the
longer they stay in captivity, the greater the likelihood is
that they will die. So Netanyahu's regime has made a
very cynical, calculated decision to let some of these hostages die.

(57:31):
And that's a reality that Israelis and the Jewish community
throughout the world have to face. The net and Yahu
regime is cynically so interested in its own power that
it is willing to essentially intentionally throw away the lives
of these completely innocent people in Hamask captivity. Now, Mike

(57:55):
Lazine wonders who are the good guys through today? Shaomi
read me rights there are no good guys. Well, I
have a view on this. In my view, the good
guys are the ordinary, peaceful civilians of all countries who

(58:16):
just want to lead their lives. And the bad guys
are the politicians, the terrorists obviously, and the people in
senior leadership, both military and civilian who want these hostilities
to keep going. That includes some people in the military
industrial complex in the United States and in Israel who

(58:41):
benefit from the prolongation of these conflicts because they get
more contracts, they get more requests to build advanced weapons.
So fourteen of these bunker buster bombs were used to
destroy the Fordah facility in Iran. That's most of the
US stockpile of these bombs. What do you think will

(59:01):
happen now? Of course, multiple large military contractors are going
to be engaged to replace that stockpile, maybe build more destructive,
more modern bonds of the sort, especially if Trump gets
away with his rhetoric of portraying this as a success
or a tremendous success, as Trump would put it. So, yes,

(59:23):
the military industrial complex does benefit from at least the
occasional US involvement in wars, though the characterization of the
Forever Wars has been more accurate in recent times. Shaomi
read Me thirteen also points out these are two supremacist
religions fighting with a top layer of having the same

(59:45):
cult running at the top. So I do wonder so
Ali Khamana, the Ayatola of Iran is a hardline fundamentalist cleric,
and as I've pointed out, much of the course of
the government of Israel is determined by essentially a very

(01:00:08):
hardline fundamentalist Jews like Smotrich and Ben Grier. So are
they that different from one another, again from the standpoint
of whether they're making their decisions based on reason or
based on religious dogma. And Shaomi read Me thirteen also
makes a good point that we need to stop being nationalists. Well,

(01:00:32):
he says it's all international banking. Yes, banking can connect people,
Trade can connect people, cultural exchange can connect people. I
think there are good parts about national identity in terms
of peculiarities of art, music, food, architecture, history. People of

(01:00:54):
different national backgrounds may have different heroes, role models, authors
that they look up to, and I do think all
of that should be preserved. But it should be preserved
as part of a global, cosmopolitan culture. And I'm not
saying it should be a monoculture where there's just a
Walmart and the McDonald's everywhere, and all of the buildings

(01:01:17):
are in this blend international style of architecture. I think
there should be a hyper pluralistic culture where people from
all over the world are able to have awareness of
and the ability to enjoy and interact with the products
of a variety of cultures peoples. Whether there's a national

(01:01:38):
basis or not, it could just be a movement. It
could be a movement that transcends borders, perhaps from a
cultural or intellectual epoch like the Baroque period of music.
That wasn't a period that only existed in one particular country,
though there could have been flavors like say Italian Baroque,
German Baroque, French Baroque with some unique nuances. But still

(01:02:02):
all of that is good. The bad type of nationalism
is the hostile or exclusivist nationalism, the nationalism that says
we are the superior nation and everybody else is worse
than us, everybody else is lesser, everybody else needs to
be subjugated to our interests or our destiny, so to speak.

(01:02:25):
And of course I don't have to convince many people
in the West of the perils of that kind of nationalism,
even though it seems to be resurgent, given that memories
of World War Two and the horrors that a certain
flavor of nationalism brought about during World War Two are fading.
Since that generation is unfortunately dying off. And again that's

(01:02:48):
an argument for transhumanism, for radical life extension, for making
people live longer so as to preserve that memory of
history and their unique views and experiences. But we definitely
need to get away from national identity as being the
primary identifier of individuals. I am a rational individualist. I

(01:03:11):
believe we are all individuals first, and we as individuals
have the ability to pick and choose what we want
in our lives. So if we see some aspects of
a national culture that we weren't born into, we should
be able to adopt them as our own. Indeed, that's
the premise of America, at least as originally framed, because

(01:03:35):
really everybody in the United States is descended from immigrants
or is an immigrant at some point in time, even
the Native Americans or Ammerindians, they came over from Asia
over the land bridge that previously linked Alaska to Siberia.

(01:03:55):
So everybody in America to some extent chooses to be
part of the United States and chooses to adopt aspects
of American culture, and we can choose to adopt different
ones depending on our preferences and our values. So that's
a kind of inclusive view of what a country should

(01:04:18):
be about. Now, do I want all countries to be
dissolved in a singular world government? Probably not at this stage,
at least not as geopolitical relations are currently constituted, because
there would be a lot of arguments about distribution of
resources and who should get what and who should vote
on what elections, etc. I would prefer a more flexible

(01:04:41):
system of largely free mobility, so people could live where
they choose as long as they're peaceful, trade and diplomacy
being the primary methods of engagement rather than war, and
certainly for there to be openness to cultural exchange rather

(01:05:02):
than demonizing people from other countries. Luis Arroyo writes, Raytheon
at all and other military contractors have profits after this
rising to the top. Yes, that will be one consequence
of this. I wouldn't be surprised if Raytheon gets a
lot of contracts, if Lockheed Martin gets a lot of contracts,

(01:05:25):
if any manufacturer of missiles, armaments, etc. Will get contracts,
if only to replenish what was expended. Because Israel's Iron
Dome has expended a lot of munitions to strike down
the Iranian missiles and drones and more will sutly be coming,
and now that there's a war, there will be very

(01:05:48):
plausible and compelling arguments that these stockpiles need to be replenished,
that wartime production needs to be ramped up. What else
are they going to do? And that's the unfortunate reality
of war. Once a war starts, you can't just wish
your way out of it. Sometimes there need to be
certain preconditions for peace, and the other side needs to

(01:06:10):
be willing to negotiate as well. Who knows how long
it will take until the Iranian side is willing to
negotiate after this, and of course I hope it will
be sooner rather than later. Josh Universe writes, any situation
where innocent people are dying is an unfortunate one. I agree.
This is why I am opposed to war, and I'm
particularly opposed to wars that our government initiates because they

(01:06:35):
are entirely avoidable. If there were, say a Pearl Harbor
type of situation where the Japanese Empire clearly attacked the
United States, then I would say, Okay, it's unavoidable, it's regrettable,
But the United States to some extent had its hand
forced when it entered World War Two, but that's not

(01:06:57):
the case here. Trump could have easily abstained from participating
in this war against Iran. Manamakkani rights, I'm so angry
because of this war, as am I I did not
want the government of my country to be involved at all.
Josh Universe asks, do I think Russia will get involved?

(01:07:18):
This is I would say, the biggest question right now.
Will Russia get involved and to what extent? So, as
we know, Iran is an ally of the government of Putin.
Iran has supplied Russia with military drones and other equipment,
so it has been integral to Russia's combat capabilities in Ukraine.

(01:07:46):
Now that the Iranian regime is crippled militarily and it
is there will be less of a drone supply or
maybe none at all. And there are some hawks in
the West who say that's a good thing that one
of Putin's supply lines has been cut in a big
way and Putin will not have as many resources to

(01:08:09):
attack Ukraine anymore or to press his advantage in Ukraine.
That may well be. The question is how is that
going to affect Putin's mindset and thinking? And I would say,
these immediate strikes probably will not draw Russia into the
war right away, so we can see expressions of outrage.

(01:08:34):
Both Russia and China have condemned the attacks as war crimes,
acts of aggression. That rhetoric, to some extent is to
be expected. Now I agree these are acts of aggression.
To the extent that civilians are killed, I think those
are war crimes. I'm not going to say it's a
war crime to destroy a military facility, so I wouldn't

(01:08:57):
go that far. But it's clear Russia and the Chinese
regime of Shijinping are both upset. So what will be
the consequence of that upsetness. Well, again, Putin is in
no desire to escalate the conflict beyond Ukraine. That is

(01:09:20):
my reading of his situation. He miscalculated terribly when he
chose to invade Ukraine. He thought it would be a cakewalk,
it would be over in three days, and the Ukrainian
military would capitulate to him. He would occupy Kiev. He
did not have enough troops when he invaded. It would

(01:09:40):
have been folly to think that one could take Ukraine,
a country of forty million people, with one hundred and
ninety thousand troops initially, so Putin learned a harsh lesson.
It turned out that Russia's military capabilities are nowhere near
as strong as were initially thought, though they have been
replenished over time with ramp ups and military production, as

(01:10:03):
well as the use of old Soviet equipment. So Putin
has held his own in a war of attrition in Ukraine,
which has been very unfortunate. It has been going on
now for three and a quarter years. And this is
where I agree with Trump's rhetoric that it should stop,
because over a million people have died, and most of

(01:10:27):
the people who have died are again completely innocent, undeserving
of losing their lives, whether they're Russians or Ukrainians or
anybody else. So Putin is spread thin. He is already
way overburdened in Ukraine. He's not going to launch another war.

(01:10:50):
The only thing we have to fear is any sort
of nuclear escalation from Russia or a nuclear threat, because
Russia does not have the conventional capabilities now to do
anything beyond Ukraine. When would a nuclear threat happen? I
would say the only way for Putin to seriously launch

(01:11:13):
a nuclear weapon is if he fears personally losing power.
Why is this important Because we have seen Putin's rhetoric
and where he was most concerned when other geopolitical events
have happened. When Saddam Hussein was tried and executed in Iraq,

(01:11:35):
when Warmart Gadafi was overthrown in Libya in twenty eleven
and brutally murdered. Both Saddam and Gaddafi were dictators, and
Putin has a lot of the characteristics of a dictator.
He worries about meeting a violent end. That is his

(01:11:58):
number one concern, and he will do anything to avoid that.
He will also help fellow dictators and save them from
meeting a violent end, like he saved Yanikovich in Ukraine.
Yanukovich was, i'd say, a quasi dictator, a corrupt quasi
autocrat want to be dictator. He saved Bashar al Asad

(01:12:19):
in Syria last year when Asad's regime was overthrown. So
Putin clearly wants to prevent dictators from meeting violent ends.
There have been suggestions, including by Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz,
who said, well Ali Kamene should be assassinated. Ali Khamene

(01:12:42):
is an eighty six year old hardline Iranian cleric. He
is essentially an old man who is said in his ways,
who is very dogmatic but not inherently a violent person.
And Putin may well try to rescue himene as an
individual and say, okay, come to Moscow, come to Russia.

(01:13:06):
We will set you up in a nice house near
where all the other dictators live. And actually, if Putin
gets to do that, he will be less likely to
respond with a nuclear strike in reaction to the war
with Iran. And I am just being purely pragmatic here.
I don't like him and a I don't like his theocracy.

(01:13:29):
I think he should be allowed to live, and I
think Putin should be allowed to rescue him. And I
also think Putin should be allowed to live, because that
is the surest guarantee that Putin will not use a
nuclear weapon. Putin wants to stay in power until he dies,
similar to Netan Yahu and similar to a certain extent

(01:13:50):
to Trump, and they will each try to stay in
power in their own respective ways. I want freedom for
human beings, technological progress, life extension, universal abundance. I don't
want anybody to die. I am not bloodthirsty. I'm not

(01:14:13):
out for revenge for the injustices that any of these
people have committed. I am for a pragmatic solution to
an escalating crisis that will leave as many people alive
as possible. So my answer in terms of how do
we get Russia to not get involved militarily in this

(01:14:35):
conflict is let putin rescue Kamine as an individual. And
Josh also writes so many moving parts to this. Yes,
I think our discussion thus far has illustrated that Shami
read me thirteen has also written Russia and Iran have
been involved with one another since the nineteen fifties. What's

(01:14:56):
interesting is the prior regime in Iran of the Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was friendly both to the United States
and to the Soviet Union. He tried to deal with
both of them, and yet he had some authoritarian elements,
but by and large he was a pro Western modernizer

(01:15:16):
who wanted to build up the instructure of his country.
Definitely better than the theocrats who run the Iranian regime
right now. But of course, the regimes of the Islamic
Republic of Iran and the Soviet Union were very different.
The Soviet Union, for all of its flaws, was a
secular regime very focused on science and technology to the

(01:15:40):
extent that its resources allowed. Unfortunately, its economic failings and
political repressions limited its abilities to advance in that respect,
but it was already a greatly liberalized regime by nineteen
seventy nine. By the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran,
so there were tensions between the Soviet Union and the

(01:16:01):
Islamic Republic of Iran to a greater extent than existed
with the Shah of Iran. Pudin has I think been
able to reach better relations with the Islamic Republic of
Iran simply because Putin doesn't care about ideology. He cares
about power, So he's thinking who are his allies who

(01:16:22):
could help him, and whether that's Kim Jong un in
North Korea or Khamina in Iran, he doesn't care. He
just wants support allies, people who will sell him drones,
people who will even send troops like the North Korean
regime did into the Kursk area. Why are North Korean
troops in Kursk? It makes no sense whatsoever unless it's

(01:16:47):
just a purely pragmatic type of alliance. Trump is trading
some favor with Kim Jong mun for another favor, so
definitely there is a hist there. And Mike writes, in
response to my earlier comments, Jannati is on fire right now,
thank you. He has read that Iran has moved their

(01:17:09):
nuclear arsenals to a safe location despite what Trump has said. Well, yes,
the Iranian military tweeted, essentially saying in response to the
attack on the Florida facility, Well, Florido has been evacuated
for months, so there's nothing there to really destroy of
any substance. And again I'll take what the Iranian regime

(01:17:30):
says with a grain of salt. I don't necessarily trust
them or believe them either. They have their own propaganda
and they're desperate to stay in power and project an
image of strength. But there could be some truth to
this that maybe their actual nuclear weapons research, to the
extent that they have it, is somewhere else, a less

(01:17:52):
conspicuous target than this big mountain with an ultra secure
facility that everybody knows about. And could the mountain have
been a diversion for the US to use fourteen of
its bunker buster weapons. Maybe maybe, But that's all just speculation.
The concept of the fog of war is very real,

(01:18:13):
and we civilians don't really know what's happening on the
ground really until the conflict is over. Mike Lazine writes,
Netanyahu needs to be subjected to the world courts and
be thrown in prison. He wonders his Interpol a part
of this. Well, here's the sad but realistic truth. Nobody

(01:18:35):
who is an ally of the United States is going
to be subject to international courts, even if the US
doesn't participate in the International Criminal Court, even if the
International Criminal Court issues an indictment. The fact is the
US is the leading global power right now, and for
all of the pretense about international law, the true international

(01:18:58):
law is might makes right. So there have been calls,
for instance, for George W. Bush or Dick Cheney to
be dragged into the International Criminal Court because of the
tremendous loss of life in a rock stemming from the
Iraq War, including the targeting of civilians by US troops. Now,

(01:19:19):
I don't take a position as to whether those two
should be tried in the International Criminal Court. I think
in practice, any time window for that has come and
gone already. But was that ever a realistic probability. Was
there ever even a point zero one percent probability of
that happening. No, Because the United States is the global hegemon,

(01:19:40):
then you don't put leaders of a global hegemon on
trial for an international court. That is not the real
international law. The real international law is the law of power. Now,
we transhumanists want there to be a different approach to
international relations, one based on morality and reason and individual

(01:20:04):
rights and technological progress and what is best for humanity
as a whole. That's not how decisions are being made today.
So what I ask and what I would challenge people
to think about, is how can we move from the
current international law, which might makes right, to a different paradigm.

(01:20:25):
But let us not deceive ourselves and thinking that the
current institutions will have any sort of proportionality or any
sort of consistent standards. When Putin attacked Ukraine, I think
that was an act of aggression. I think he shouldn't
have done it, and I think a lot of people

(01:20:48):
in the Western world especially recognize this is an act
of aggression and unnecessary war that should not have happened. Well,
when Israel attacked Iran, also making a first strike but
saying oh, we were provoked, etc. Was that not the
same act of aggression? Was that not the exact same

(01:21:08):
situation from a moral standpoint? But Israel is an ally
of the United States, and the United States joined in
the war, And there's no consideration of what is aggression
or what is not aggression if you are not the
global hegemon. So the current world order is might makes right.

(01:21:28):
And if you're not the global hegemon and you attack
a country, that's aggression. If you are aligned with the
global hegemon and you attack a country, the other country
is committing aggression against you, that is the reality. How
can we have a different reality? So I'll pause for

(01:21:49):
a moment and let art Ramone offer any further feedback,
and then we'll continue engaging with the audience.

Speaker 2 (01:21:56):
Comments, Yeah, my last where did he get cut off?

Speaker 1 (01:22:04):
Yeah? I think you still have the audio issue, So
see what you can do to fix that, because I
would like to hear you more clearly. We have MANA
mccannie saying that many of his compatriots have been killed

(01:22:25):
in this war and they were innocent people. Yes, and
again that is a tragedy that shouldn't have happened. Hopefully
Artramone will come back soon as well. Now Josh Universe
asks what happened to the original subject of the salon?
While our guests notified me at the last moment that

(01:22:46):
he had a time conflict, So that's what happened. We
will try to reschedule this as well. So Luis writes
that I have to come to terms that it's not
just Hamas. A lot of groups are defending themselves against
apartheid and now genocide. So obviously apartheid and genocide are bad.

(01:23:08):
We don't condone them. I think there are good and
bad ways to defend oneself, So attacking innocent civilians is
never a good way. And that is one hundred percent
always the case. If your cause is just, you don't
need to have innocent victims. And I will say this

(01:23:32):
with regard to all sides of this conflict. I don't
approve of Israel bombing entire neighborhoods with the pretexts that, oh,
some people there might be terrorists, or the militants might
be there. The militants might have come entdeered this hospital
and made it a command center underground, And in half
of those instances, nothing is discovered. Once the hospital is

(01:23:55):
turned to rubble. So I don't condone that, but I
don't condone the action of a group coming in killing
innocent civilians at a music festival just because they want
to send a message to a government that either has
been perceived to be oppressing them or has been actually

(01:24:16):
oppressing them. It doesn't matter those innocent civilians are not
a party to that oppression. I've always been of the
view that in these kinds of situations, the decision makers,
the leaders, should sort it out amongst themselves. Maybe there
could even be some sort of stylized fight, gladiatorial combat

(01:24:37):
set Netan Yahu against Yahya Sinowar Sinhwar is dead now,
but against whatever leader Netanyahu wants to fight, and have
them fight it out. I don't know if it needs
to be to the death, or it could be some
sort of boxing match or whatever the case is. And
maybe if any of them are too old, they could

(01:24:59):
designate champions. Nedan Yahoo designates a champion from Israel. Maybe
Hamane designates a champion from Iran, and they fight it
out and they agree in advance on what the outcomes
will be if either side wins. That's a more humane
way to do it, So that is I think a

(01:25:22):
much better way. Selmi read Me thirteen asks who is civilized? Though,
I would say the civilized entity is the one that
doesn't attack innocent people, that doesn't target innocent people. And
there is a difference, I would say, from a moral standpoint,
between unintentional loss of innocent lives, like if you thought

(01:25:45):
you were targeting a military compound but there did end
up being civilians there from something like an intentional targeting
of civilians. So our vermona is back. Welcome. Let's hear
your audio testing testing. Yes, we can hear you clearly. Okay,

(01:26:06):
keep going, Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
I have to reboot. Where did I leave off? Flast?
What is the last thing you've heard?

Speaker 1 (01:26:12):
When I was so, you were talking about essentially ways
in which the US could be vulnerable to attacks from Iran.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Yeah. Uh, there's off the Canary Islands, there's the kumbre
Vieka Cliff. It's like a potential landslide. So it's an
underwater landslide, which is you know, it's a natural danger.
Supposedly it's happened before, but it wouldn't take much for

(01:26:45):
a sub with conventional torpedoes to to trigger that landslide,
which would create a mega tsunami that wipes out the
East coast. So I'm saying there are these natural, you know,
dangers that could be triggered, and to me, that would
be something that Iran could use to retaliate because they

(01:27:10):
don't need mix. They do have a sub fleet. I'm
not sure what sort of underwater drones they have, but
that's something that if illered the us I would keep
submarines monitoring that area because said it wouldn't take much
to trigger that disaster of a megas not be hit

(01:27:32):
in the East coast.

Speaker 1 (01:27:34):
So yeah, yes, And I think what will limit Iran
from doing that is in many cases simply lack of
technical know how. So I think it's important to realize,
for all of the efforts Iran has made in its
nuclear program, its capabilities are not nearly as advanced as

(01:27:59):
those of the United States or Israel for that matters. So,
Israel is a country of less than ten million people.
Iran is a country of ninety million people. Israel attacked
a country of more than nine times its population. Why
did the Israeli leadership think it was a reasonable decision,

(01:28:19):
even a conceivable decision? For them to do that because
they see that they have overwhelming military superiority over Iran.
So I would say asymmetric warfare tends to be done
very crudely, just like say, the September eleventh attacks were

(01:28:40):
done with very primitive methods. After the September eleventh attacks,
there was a period of time in the United States
where a lot of people foreign policy scholars were worried
about nuclear terrorism, the so called dirty bomb scenario. I
remember attending a lecture at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

(01:29:04):
This was when I was in high school in two
thousand and four, and there was a scholar there by
the name of Graham Allison. He still writes to this day,
but at that time he was saying, well, the occurrence
of a nuclear terrorist attack on US soil is not

(01:29:26):
a matter of if, it's a matter of when, because
it's so easy, ostensibly for a terrorist to detonate a
dirty bomb in an American city, and yet this hasn't happened.
And I was skeptical at the time when I heard
Graham Allison make that statement, because I thought, well, terrorists

(01:29:47):
don't have a lot of resources, they are desperate, and
I'm not going to say anything about let's say they're
raw intelligence, or what they would be to accomplish had they,
for instance, gotten a Western style education or anything of
that sort. But the fact is they've intentionally isolated themselves

(01:30:12):
from that, and they're essentially ragtag militants who are making
these attacks out of desperation. Do you think they're going
to have the sophistication to engineer a nuclear weapon or
even acquire one from some state which has suboptimal security.

(01:30:34):
I have my doubts. I think they're going to use
more primitive tools, But of course primitive tools primitive means
can still lead to a lot of loss of life.
And what worries me is an escalation of even lone
wolf terrorist attacks mass shootings, for instance, or planting of

(01:30:54):
conventional explosives, airline hijackings, or bombings of embassies holding diplomat's hostage.
The Iranian regime still has the capability to strike military
bases that the US has in the Middle East, and
I happen to think the US has a greatly oversized

(01:31:16):
military presence in the Middle East. A lot of troops
should be pulled back from that. But the fact is
the troops that are there now should be protected, and
there hasn't seemed to be a plan for doing that effectively.
This was an area that the Trump administration just seems
to have disregarded. It focused on how to execute the

(01:31:40):
strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities or alleged nuclear facilities,
but it hasn't given a lot of thought to the
fact that, well, all of these American bases, and they
exist in Iraq, in Syria, in the Gulf States and
all throughout the Middle East, they are outside of the

(01:32:02):
defensive systems of the Israeli so called Iron Dome, which
primarily protects Israel. Understandably, so how are these troops, how
are these assets going to be protected? That is worrisome
as well, So I think that is important to consider.

(01:32:26):
Luisa Royo writes overthrowing a government via piece is very
very rare. Betting on such is interesting and uncertain. Well,
keep in mind, I live through the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and that was a completely peaceful collapse. Such
collapses don't happen right away. They tend to happen when

(01:32:47):
a regime atrophies from within. So they don't happen when
a dictatorial or authoritarian or totalitarian regime is at its
peak and is the most repressive. It happens when the
elites actually become a bit softer and over time they're

(01:33:08):
less inclined to use repressive measures to cling to power.
At the same time, there's a rising middle class, there's
more access to information, there's more free thought, and there's
more hope for the future. And that's the kind of
peaceful evolution that could lead to a formerly authoritarian regime

(01:33:29):
which is now decaying from within, being toppled. There is
a lot of evidence that this has been the trajectory
that the Iranian regime was on. That a lot of
the people in Iran do not like the rule of
the Iatolis. They do not like being under the thumb
of a military theocracy. And many people in Iran are

(01:33:53):
highly educated. They're intelligent, they have a historical memory, they
have memories of the Persian Empire, they have memories of
more approximately the rule of Shah Mohammed. And again Shah
Mohammad was a pro Western, modernizing ruler, not a perfect ruler,
but I would say for that part of the world,

(01:34:15):
a decent one. So with rising hope and present day limitations,
but with the regime not being as repressive as it
used to be. That is fertile soil for a revolution,

(01:34:35):
but an internal revolution, and hopefully a peaceful one. I
would like to see every authoritarian regime fall along the
lines that the Soviet Union fell so peacefully, through mass
public actions, but largely also due to the ruling elites deciding, well,

(01:34:58):
we don't want to have this particular flavor of authoritarian
regime anymore. We don't want to have a theocracy, we
don't want to have any sort of dictatorship. Will find
a different way to remain relevant. So in Russia, after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lot of the oligarchs,
the so called oligarchs were previous Communist Party functionaries who

(01:35:21):
just decided to appropriate former state held assets and essentially
run them like their own fiefdoms. Sometimes that was not
optimal either, and a lot of these enterprises became less productive.
There was hyperinflation as well, and the people became upset.

(01:35:41):
Hence they elected Putin. By the way, but this was
a situation where the old elite decided to transition to
a new type of elite structure, and for all of
the problems of the oligarchs. They allowed freedom of speech,
They allowed much greater pluralism of ideas and values in

(01:36:05):
Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So there
was more individual freedom in the nineteen nineties than there
was in the Soviet era. So could some let's say
suboptimal but directionally better transformation happened to the Iranian elite,
most of whom are not ideological hardliners. Now Hamina is

(01:36:26):
he is a dogmatic theocrat, but I think he can
still be given essentially a dignified way out of power
because he is not a warmonger. Actually, he has said
before that he does not think a nuclear bomb should

(01:36:46):
ever be used. He literally said that several years ago.
So he isn't intending to attack Israel or the United States,
at least he wasn't. Now he may want to fight
for his life. And again the question in my mind is,
how does this get de escalated? How can we get

(01:37:07):
Homine out of power so that he just lives out
the rest of his life in peace, and then some change,
some peaceful regime change, can happen in Iran. And then
shall me read me thirteen rights? If you do it
by peace alone, you will usually get a new government

(01:37:27):
with enough of the old rot still sitting. As I've said, yes,
that could happen, and he says it's always important what
comes after. Yes, but the question is do we insist
on an ideal outcome or do we insist on an
outcome that's good enough for the broader objectives that we

(01:37:47):
have as a civilization. And I will say this from
the standpoint of a transhumanist view. I support maximal geopolitical
stability as well as internal social stability for the next
several decades in order to allow technological progress to proceed

(01:38:09):
as rapidly as possible, because technology is by far the
most transformational force in terms of actually lifting limitations upon humanity. Now,
a lot of people think, okay, it's better to live
in a democratic regime than an autocratic regime. But unless
we expand maximum life spans, people in democratic societies are

(01:38:34):
still going to live if they have good health care,
into their nineties. Some lucky ones will live past one
hundred and some people in authoritarian regimes if they don't
lapse into let's say the vices of despair, could live
that long as well. So if we really want truly

(01:38:55):
transformational events to happen to open up human potential. We
need the technology of life extension. We need the technology
of artificial intelligence. We need the technologies of automation, space colonization,
vertical farming, desalination, energy generation to advance. How do we

(01:39:18):
do that. We can't do that if there are riots everywhere,
we can't do that. If countries continue to be in
a state of war against one another, we can't do that.
If huge amounts of resources trillions of dollars per year
in the United States are expended on the military industrial complex.
The only way we can do that is if there's

(01:39:39):
general peace, and in an environment of general peace, technology
proceeds more quickly. Its benefits are spread through trade and cooperation,
including nonprofit organizations charitable institutions. In peaceful times, if you're
a supporter of government program the government programs to make

(01:40:02):
certain goods available can be more generous as well. There's
not as much competition with let's say, military goals. So
to get to a transhumanist future as fast as possible,
we need to de escalate as many conflicts, both foreign
and domestic, as possible. Daniel Tweed writes, philosophically speaking, all

(01:40:25):
coercion is a failed state. Yes, I completely agree with you.
Super Finguy characterizes this as the West versus the East.
I think while there are geopolitical blocks forming, and if
you consider the identities of the countries in those blocks,

(01:40:45):
there is a kind of West East split. Russia ran
North Korea on the one hand, China perhaps, and then
the US NATO powers Israel. But where that delineation exists
is very much an open question, and whether it has
to exist is another open question. Keep in mind, twenty

(01:41:07):
years ago, it was considered inconceivable for the US and
China to have a hot war or even the kind
of level of hostilities that exists today. In fact, I again,
when I was in high school, attended lectures where either

(01:41:29):
a representative of a Chinese embassy or a representative of
a nonprofit organization that prioritized US Chinese relations, I forget
which one talked about. Essentially the philosophy of the Chinese
Communist Party leadership at the time, and their philosophy was

(01:41:49):
make the world so dependent on trade with China that essentially,
if any country cuts off the lag of China metaphorically,
they'll be cutting off their own arm as well. So
the idea was have so much trade, so many infrastructure agreements, deals, etc.

(01:42:12):
That any move against China would cripple the country that
undertook that move. So that's not a recipe for geopolitical hostilities.
That's a recipe for an interconnected world. I actually support
a situation where there are so many interconnections through trade
that war becomes impossible. As Frederic Bastiat, the great nineteenth

(01:42:37):
century French classical economists, wrote, when goods don't cross borders,
armies will, and we're seeing that with increasing isolationism and
trade leading to greater military hostilities. And then Daniel Tweed
rights north versus South as the flashpoint for east versus West.

(01:42:58):
Interesting observation. Again, I am hoping for a more interconnected
world where we don't have to deal with these kinds
of strict divisions or delineations. We certainly don't want another
Cold War, though we do seem to be heading in
that direction. And then Jennifer Hues wrights, I don't think

(01:43:22):
anyone is betting on a peaceful overthrow, but the fact is,
all times we are trying to change a corrupt government
should be done in the most peaceful way possible, and
it's very possible. Indeed, the son of the former Shah
of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in the United States,
was interviewed recently and he said essentially he would prefer

(01:43:44):
that the United States and Israel hold off on further
military strikes and implement a strategic pause, as he described it,
to let the Iranian people sort this matter out. I
think that too would have been preferable to the actions
of the Trump administration. But he was saying essentially, the
Iranian regime is weakened. Now, let the Iranian people decide

(01:44:08):
what to do with it, hopefully peacefully, hopefully with some
transition to a more humane leadership. Again, the concern here
is if the United States bombs, especially a lot of
civilian areas of Iran, that will antagonize the people and
turn them against the United States, against Israel, against the West,

(01:44:31):
and further lead them to rally around the hardliners. Now,
Daniel also writes all this bloodshed is from failing to
treat land as a logical commons. Well, I would say
peace is consistent with private property in land. I think

(01:44:51):
there should be an idea that land isn't this izuro
some kind of resource where one people or one nation
should be ready to engage in hostilities against another people

(01:45:14):
or another nation to claim their land. At the root
of a lot of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians
in the Middle East is this idea of well, whose
land was it? And the Palestinian narrative is, well, they've

(01:45:35):
lived there under the Ottoman Empire, and then the Jewish
settlers came in and took their land and forced them
to resettle. And the Israeli narrative as well, we need
our own land, our own Jewish homeland. Otherwise, if we
only live in other countries, then there's a risk that
will get persecuted and the governments will turn against us.

(01:45:57):
And then there's this whole debate about whose land wasn't originally,
And a lot of Israelis will point again to these
biblical narratives their own history, saying, oh, well, Jewish people
were there three thousand years ago, and the Palestinians where
newer arrivals or Arabs were newer arrivals to those parts.

(01:46:19):
And the Palestinians will say, well, but we've lived there
for centuries, how is this relevant, etc. I don't think
any of this is relevant. I think we need to
focus on where people are living now and not expropriate people,
not forcibly remove people from where they're living now. Maybe

(01:46:41):
give them choices. Maybe if somebody wants to acquire their land,
they should pay fair market value for it, and again
give them a choice and give them options. But removing
people through force from the land where they happen to
live now, they as individuals, irrespective of what people they

(01:47:03):
belong to or what the history is, that's a crime.
That is transgression against an individual and his or her
or their property. So I don't buy these ancestral arguments
at all. I think it should all be done based
on who lives where now and respecting that now. Luis

(01:47:27):
Arroyo is concerned about how the US treats its peacefully
protesting citizens, and he thinks conflict can be sparked due
to violence from authorities. It's a difficult situation because in
the US we see violence on both sides. We see
the ICE agents certainly not treating people well, and peaceful

(01:47:50):
protesters have been attacked. On the other hand, we've seen
protesters or rioters attacking innocent people as well, burning infrastructure
to drowing way more vehicles in Los Angeles, attacking storefronts,
all of that is illegitimate, all of that is wrong.
And any party that engages in attacks against innocent individuals,

(01:48:13):
whether it calls itself a government or whether it's a
civilian protest movement or resistance force, whatever it is, the
tactics themselves are wrong. The tactics themselves are always unjustified.
And again, as to the question, who are the good guys,
the good guys are those who do not do that.

(01:48:34):
That's my answer, and I will support those who do
not do that. So I believe in the rights of
people to protest peacefully. I believe if a government is oppressive,
the people have the right to peacefully overthrow that government.
But I don't believe in attacking civilians. I don't believe
in looting or breaking things. I don't believe in intentionally

(01:48:56):
causing damage. Now, again, there's a difference between inadvertent collateral
damage where you really didn't know that there would be
innocent victims. That's still a problem, that's still a crime.
So say, manslaughter is still a crime, but it's a
lesser crime than intentionally inflicting damage. So it's important to

(01:49:19):
make that moral distinction, and unfortunately, I will say moral
distinctions are in short supply in times of escalating conflict,
and that is what we need to watch out for
as human beings. We need to keep our moral principles
first and foremost in our minds and not lapse into
let's say, collectivistic thinking us versus them. These are the

(01:49:41):
evil people and anything is justified against them. That's a
very dangerous mindset. So we only have a few minutes
left in our virtual Enlightenment salon today. I hope that
those of you who tuned in, despite the unexpected turns
of events, and there have been several, still found this

(01:50:05):
to be worthwhile, certainly an important subject to discuss. Art Ramona,
let you say a few words before we conclude.

Speaker 2 (01:50:15):
Yeah, I'm expecting things to get worse as far as
you know global politics, but even with even war, I mean,
not everything is affected. So hopefully there is enough stability
for technology to keep moving forward so that you know,
we could realize or transhuman ideas. But yeah, you know,

(01:50:38):
the news tends to focus in on the negative, so
you think, you know, the world's falling apart, but it's
it's really just little geographic areas you know, during World
War Two, I mean, the US was entirely untouched for Hawaii.
Uh So I'm hoping that there are enough pockets of

(01:51:00):
stipuldy that you know what, they continue to move forward.

Speaker 1 (01:51:06):
Yes, yes, indeed, well we have I think a very
clear alternative before us. We have, on the one hand,
a future of peace and abundance and progress and prosperity
that can be realized if people pursue the path of technology,

(01:51:27):
the path of reason and morality, and it is really insight.
We've had amazing progress and automation and artificial intelligence, and
biotechnology is ramping up as well. So within our lifetimes
we can have the world that transhumanists hope for, or
we can remain stuck in the old ways of demonization, hostility,

(01:51:53):
zero sum thinking, and ultimately the infliction of death and destruction.
And that is what we should hope to avoid.

Speaker 2 (01:52:02):
And this is.

Speaker 1 (01:52:03):
Why, in my view, we cannot tolerate any aggressive wars.
And there are many people who will be on our
side here because even a lot of Trump's MAGA base
specifically voted for him because they thought he would keep
America out of new wars and help focus on domestic issues.

(01:52:25):
And now they've been bitterly disappointed. I hope they channel
that disappointment into something constructive. I hope they realize the
folly of following a populist, opportunistic leader like Trump and
instead seek to exert more of their own agency. If
they want to keep the US out of war, they

(01:52:45):
need to put political pressure on Trump and on the
Republican establishment, which is still very much comprised of foreign
policy hawks like Lindsey Graham, who really would love to
bomb any country that's mentioned to him. So thank you,
Art Ramon, Thank you to all of our audience members

(01:53:10):
who joined us today. We've had a robust chat, certainly
very interesting, very thoughtful comments. As always, I am grateful
for the regular and loyal viewership of our Virtual Enlightenment Salons.
We couldn't have this caliber of conversation without the kind

(01:53:32):
of audience that we have. How can we scale this
up to the world, Because if the entire world we're
engaged in discourse at this level, then wars would not
be happening, demonizations of entire peoples would not be happening.
We would truly be in a new age of enlightenment,

(01:53:53):
and we would all be able to live long and prosper.

Speaker 2 (01:54:01):
In output, in output,

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